Sunday, December 31, 2006

C'mon folks, there must be some of you who like new-fangled web apps.The one who writes the best explanation of how Raketu and its features - particularly the multi-media, video on demand -podcast type stuff works on Raketu will win a prize.

I'll draw your caricature and add a cartoon character to it.Scroll down to the last two posts, use Raketu and then describe how it works for you.

If you write it super clearly, you will win! Maybe I'll even hire you.Your pal,

Thursday, December 28, 2006

Here're some more of my scribbly "bus-drawing-style" storyboard sketches for Raketu. On cheap-ass crummy paper. Kali witnessed this whole process and will describe to you what happens to my anatomy during the creative act in a comment. ...If you beg her to.The best place to create scribbles is at Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles. It's a soul-food restaurant that has the best fried chicken ever. http://www.roscoeschickenandwaffles.com/I recommend "The Stubby" and a side of greens. They have the bext textures to squirt out of your mouth as you furiously try to wring your story sketches into life.I pitched "Man's Best Friend" to Chris Reccardi at Roscoe's and a brother got mad and threw his knife and fork down and started yelling at us "Hey Hey Hey Hey!!! I'm trying to eat here! And you're talking about shitting and eating dog puke! What kind of a show do you call that!!..." But don't think about that. Think about how cool it would be to get all the gossip from all your friends in one Instant message window.Get Raketu now. It's super easy to download and start and then you can talk to everyone on any IM service.Think about how cool it would be to get entertaining ads that actually tell you what the product does.Think about daring innovative companies like Raketu that could sponsor whole cartoons and just add their commercials in them, using my characters to sell their futuristic products.Think about Sody Pop sitting in her flimsy static-clinging negligee Instant messaging you on a dark lonely night.

UNIVERSAL INSTANT MESSAGING

If you have AIM, then you can't talk to your friends who have MSN or Yahoo, etc. Not without downloading each service and leaving all these windows open at the same time. SCREW THAT! Raketu lets you talk to anyone on any instant message service all at the same time. You just tell Raketu which services you want to be active.

COMBINE ALL YOUR ONLINE APPLICATIONS INTO ONE AND DO MULTIPLE TASKS AT ONCE

Podcasting, multimedia, games, entertainment and more stuff can all be done. To be honest, I haven't used many of these services anyway, but if you do, then you can be useful to the whole world.

So listen. Do me a favor and help me do my job here and you will see more cartoons fast-by the end of January!

If you have a PC (which I don't) download Raketu and sign up (don't even pay the 10 bucks yet if you don't need the phone stuff right away, just use all the free stuff) and then post comments telling me what you like best.

I'm gonna put cartoons up on the Raketu that advertise each of these aspects of Raketu so now's your chance to feed me some input!

So the Raketu ad I did worked out pretty well...well enough that they asked me to design their web page in a similar vein and animate some cartoons. Here's some of my thumbnail boards for it.I met with Greg Parker, the genius rocket scientist who created Raketu and did the programming and he gave me a live demo to show me what Raketu was and what it could do.

His iconoclastic headstrong Irish marketing rebel, Oliver McIntyre and I got together to cook up swell new ways to advertise the product that will be entertaining even while it explains why your world will be much simpler by using Raketu.

My problem is how to sell a product that does so many things. It seems to coordinate all the activities you do on the internet into one window and program. That's hard to say in an ad! People want to know simple and clear specifics, so we decided to break up the Raketu application into broad main categories.

FREE PHONE SERVICE THROUGH YOUR COMPUTER OR SMART PHONE

The most obvious thing it does is save tons of money in phone bills. For $9.95-as a one time payment, you get to start a Raketu account and then you get to call national and international for nothing in 42 countries. The countries that aren't free are still waay cheaper than any phone company or other VOIP service. So if you get Raketu for nothing else, you will see your phone bills dwindle to just what you pay for your monthly internet bill or your cell phone minimum minutes payment.

These are some of the storyboard sketches I did for a cartoon which brings old George Liquor into the world of the future and saves him a shitload of cash (which is the only way to get him to soften his distrust of anything new!)You have to get a phone or headphones with microphone to hook up to your computer, then you call thousands of miles away and talk as long as you like.

Raketu is mainly for PC users, not Mac yet and it simplifies your nasty windows within windows torture.

Some other key selling points:

UNIVERSAL INSTANT MESSAGING

If you have AIM, then you can't talk to your friends who have MSN or Yahoo, etc. Not without downloading each service and leaving all these windows open at the same time. SCREW THAT! Raketu lets you talk to anyone on any instant message service all at the same time. You just tell Raketu which services you want to be active.

COMBINE ALL YOUR ONLINE APPLICATIONS INTO ONE AND DO MULTIPLE TASKS AT ONCE

Podcasting, multimedia, games, entertainment and more stuff can all be done. To be honest, I haven't used many of these services anyway, but if you do, then you can be useful to the whole world.

So listen. Do me a favor and help me do my job here and you will see more cartoons fast-by the end of January!

If you have a PC (which I don't) download Raketu and sign up (don't even pay the 10 bucks yet if you don't need the phone stuff right away, just use all the free stuff) and then post comments telling me what you like best.

I'm gonna put cartoons up on the Raketu that advertise each of these aspects of Raketu so now's your chance to feed me some input!

Wednesday, December 27, 2006

When I was about 8 years old and started seriously getting obsessed with animated cartoons, I had 2 favorite studios: Walt Disney and Hanna Barbera.

The motion in Disney seemed completely magical to me, but I didn't really get into the characters. The early Hanna Barbera cartoons intrigued me for the drawing style and that the characters seemed real-which was largely due to Ed Benedict's designs and the great voice work of Daws Butler, Don Messick and Mel Blanc and others.It was very hard to find any written information about how cartoons were made in 1963 or who made them. I had an article in The Books Of Knowledge that talked about Walt Disney, but the only info I had about Hanna Barbera was the back of a record cover that had a paragraph on each of the partners.

I taught myself to draw by watching the cartoons and drawing as fast as I can. I then bought all the comic books and coloring books and used the grid method to get the basic proportions of the characters. I mostly drew HB characters, but I also drew everyone else's-even Tom and Jerry, whose cartoons I had never seen.Well I memorized how to draw Huck, Yogi, the Flintstones, The Jetsons, Quick Draw McGraw and I used to draw my own comic stories of them.By the time I was a teenager and trying to be cool and stuff, I STILL drew the characters only now, I drew dirty drawings of them and developed a caricatured style of drawing them. This ability kept me popular with the football team who I would amuse with my "Cave Nudes" and other wacky cartoon stories and filthy flip books. It kept me from being beat up for being a wimpy cartoonist.

By this time though, Hanna Barbera's cartoons had gone to shit. Scooby Doo was the dominant style, a style lifted from Filmation's cheaper uglier Archie cartoons. I couldn't figure out why HB had abandoned their earlier appealing style for something so purposely ugly. Even the voices were terrible by this time. I found out later by working at Hanna Barbera and eventually talking to Joe and Bill themselves.

In 1984, after working on horrible and typically depressing 80s cartoons for 4 years, I heard that Hanna Barbera was going to revive the Jetsons and I desperately wanted to work on something fun. I'm not able to work on ugly bland cartoons without getting severely depressed. I don't know how so many people do it.

I had just finished a stint as a designer for Dic's Heathcliff cartoons. This had been my best job so far, because I didn't have to do storyboards from bad scripts or layouts from bad storyboards. It was my first character design job and they gave me a lot of freedom to draw characters as cute and funny as I was then capable. I did about 7 shows a week then with Bruce Timm, Jim Gomez as my clean up artists and Lynne Naylor designing some of the characters with me.

So as soon as I heard about HB reviving the Jetsons, I raced over there to apply to be the character designer. I got an interview with the head of the incidental character design department - Bob Singer. Bob was a decent guy, a reasonable draftsman, but extremely conservative and with no design ability whatsoever. His natural design style is the cop and mailman characters you see in Scooby Doo and other 70s HB cartoons-REALLY BLAND. Bob was an enemy of style and cartooniness. He hated it!

I drew up a big stack of sample Jetsons style characters to show him and he looked through them with much attention and was mildly impressed. He said, "Well you seem to have a knack for this old UPA-ish style, but you are tending to overdo the flatness and designiness of that period. The Jetsons aren't actually flat. They are 3 dimensional.

Tell you what, Bill and Joe are not happy with the development sketches on the New Jetsons and I have a couple trainee designers who are struggling with the style and don't quite get it.

I'll give you a test. If you work in house on The Smurfs as a designer for awhile, then we'll see how you do and I'll consider showing your stuff to the bosses."

AAAARGH!

torture.

So I had to sit in an office next to the two kids who were "struggling" with Jetsons characters and listen to them complain about how hard it is to draw Ed Benedict's style while I suffered under the cruel blandness of the Smurfs and Gerard Baldwin and his team of moronic evil writers. These two Einsteins would come in and tell me how envious they were of my job on The Smurfs.

A month or two went by as I got more and more depressed, and the whole time I would hear rumors that the show's producer Alex Lovy and Bill and Joe themselves were rejecting everything that the design department was doing.

Finally, I guess Singer must have been taking some heat, so he came to me and said "OK, John I'll give you your chance. Here, take home these character descriptions for an episode of the Jetsons and then design them the best you can." I did them that night and brought them in to Bob the next day and then he looked at them with disapproval and told me that they were still too flat and designy There was no way he could show them to Bill and Joe or Alex. But I could still work on the Smurfs if I wanted to.

That was one black day in my early career. I was just dying to barge into Joe's office to see for myself whether he thought I could do it or not. Instead I made up my mind to quit. I couldn't stand another day of the Smurfs and listening to the toddlers in the next room deciding that Superman was easier to animate than Fred Flintstone, because Superman was more 3 dimensional.

Well, I figured, I'll take a chance. Maybe I'll get blackballed for going over Singer's head, but I was just DYING to work on a real cartoon, so I marched over to the executive building of HB and was walking down the hall hoping to run into Bill or Joe, when I bumped into Alex Lovy. He's the Walter Lantz director and storyboard artist, who was going to produce the new Jetsons.

I was clutching my huge stack of Jetsons samples and was nervous as Hell but I blurted out, "Mr. Lovy! You don't know me, but I'm a big fan of yours! I love Woody Woodpecker and I know you are producing the Jetsons and I'm dying to work for you!"

Alex was real nice and invited me into his room and said "Let's see what you got , son!"

He started flipping through the drawings and his eyes lit up and he said, "Hey kid! This is just what we're looking for! You got this old style down! Let's go see if Joe is in his office!"

Alex whisked me down the hall and knocked on the door to Joe's office. Joe opened the door and there he was! I was looking at my childhood hero in the flesh for the first time. A tall suave Italian guy in a nice suit and jet black curly hair.

Alex said, Joe, you gotta see what the kid is doing! Take a look at this stuff!"

Joe led us in and started flipping through the drawings and chuckling. He smiled real big, then smacked the stack of drawings and said. "This is what we've been trying to get for months now! I keep telling the guys that this is an old fashioned UPA style and that it's supposed to be flat but no one will do it!"

He then looked serious and a bit worried. "Iwao and Bob are great artists but they just don't seem to get this style. Tell me about yourself kid. Why is this so important to you?"

So I told him how I used to draw his characters all the time when I was a kid and that I loved this style and always wanted to do it. I had begged Bob Singer to let me work on it but he kept telling me I was drawing too flat so he wouldn't show you."

I went on, like an idiot to tell him I hated Scooby Doo and all modern cartoons, and Joe said "Me too kid. I've never understood why the networks keep ordering more episodes of it. What is there to it? A big dumb dog and some teenagers. Every show is the same Goddamn story! It doesn't make sense to me but they can have it as long they want it."

I was amazed that Joe wasn't offended by that. This was my first inkling that Joe really knew how awful the cartoons were that his studio had been churning out for decades.

Joe was rubbing his face and thinking.

By the way, he had the coolest office. It was filled with toys of all his characters and awards and he even showed off his private shower! He didn't get naked or anything, luckily.

Joe said, "Son, I want you on this show but I gotta figure out how to do it without offending Bob and Iwao. These guys got feelings you know. They been here a long time and figure they have seniority. But don't worry, I'll work it out and get you on."

To be continued:

I have so many stories that I think I will spread them out for a bit.

Coming soon:

Being a development artist for Joe on a project for Fred Silverman.

My stint on the Jetsons and trying out an early version of the Spumco production system.

Developing "Perry Gunite" in a trailor with Eddie's wife on the HB lot.

Being consultants for Cartoon Network with Bill, Joe, Friz and Don Messick.

Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Bobe Cannon is becoming one of my favorite animators. Here's a scene I think is him in an early Chuck Jones cartoon.

It's very soft and subdued, but with careful solid drawings, a little different than the fast loopy stuff he usually does.

I always liked his stuff in Jones' cartoons, but now I'm recognizing more and more of his scenes in 30s Clampett cartoons, and late 40s Avery cartoons and I think I like that stuff even better because those directors seemed to encourage him to be funnier.

In the Jones cartoons, the direction seems to be more restrained as far as funny action goes, but Cannon was completely capable of combining his lyrical loopy style with the very funny actions and accents demanded by Clampett and Avery.

I've always wondered why Cannon left Warners to join Avery at MGM. Simply money? Or did he have a falling out with Jones?

I haven't heard Jones talk much about Cannon, yet I think he is Jones' strongest animator.Anybody know some history here? Greg Duffle? Jerry? Anyone?His animation in Avery's Senor Droopy is so full, and exciting and funny. I find it baffling and ironic that a couple years after his best most fully animated funniest period, he completely went the other way and directed stiff pose to pose cartoons for UPA. You can see his transformation on the way to being stiff in Avery's Rural Riding Hood. He animated the buck toothed country girl in a halfway pose to pose style. It's very good, but less fully animated, with lots of holds and a more graphic angular design.